From Oslo to Washington?

Today, the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded former Vice President Al Gore and the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts to educate the public about global warming. In a "Fighting Words" column last month, Christopher Hitchens argued that a Nobel Prize would boost Al Gore's chances of winning a presidential bid and wondered eagerly if Gore would run. The column is reprinted below.

I am occasionally asked why it is that so many Europeans display reflexive anti-Americanism, and I force myself to choose from a salad of possible answers. One of these is the resentment that I can remember feeling myself when I lived in England in the 1970s: the sheer brute fact that American voters who knew nothing about Europe (and cared less) could pick a president who had more clout than any of our elected prime ministers could exert. America could change our economic climate by means of the Federal Reserve, could use bases in Britain to forward its policies in Asia or the Middle East, and all the rest of it. Americans could also choose a complete crook like Richard Nixon, or a complete moron like Jimmy Carter, and we still had to watch our local politicians genuflect to the so-called Atlantic alliance.

Nowadays, this bothers me slightly less than it used to do. (George Bush at his worst is preferable to Gerhard Schröder or Jacques Chirac—politicians who put their own countries in pawn to Putin and the Chinese and the Saudis.) But I can still feel the old pang gnawing away. And I can still sense the European instinct for revenge or, to phrase it another way, for the chance to influence U.S. politics in return. One of the ways in which this influence can be exerted is the award of the Nobel Peace Prize. (And not just the peace prize, either; the so-called "prize" for literature has been awarded quite openly to figures who earned their reputations as enemies of the American imperium, just as the laurels bestowed on Jimmy Carter were accompanied by explicit remarks from Scandinavia to the effect that this might put a spoke in Bush's wheel.)

On Oct. 12, we shall hear again from Oslo, and I will be very surprised indeed if the peace prize is not awarded to Albert Gore Jr. (Don't ask what a campaign against global warming has done for "peace"; that would be like asking what Mother Teresa or Henry Kissinger had ever done to reduce global conflict. The impression is the main thing.)

So, and if I am right, the former vice president will then complete a year in which An Inconvenient Truth has been awarded an Oscar and he has authored a best seller. Roll it round your tongue again: an Oscar, a best seller, and a Nobel Prize in the space of 12 months or so. Not bad. And meanwhile, the field of Democratic candidates looks—how shall one put it?—a trifle etiolated. Sen. Clinton may have succeeded in getting people to call her "Hillary" and to have made them feel resigned to her front-runnership, but what kind of achievement is that? Sen. Obama cannot possibly believe, and doesn't even act as if he believes, that he can be elected president of the United States next year. John Edwards is a good man who is in politics for good reasons, but there is something about his populism that doesn't quite—what's the word?—translate.